When I was approached to contribute to this blog, I was asked to avoid the low-lying fruit. I can see the rationale for that, but I couldn’t resist commenting on this venomous little piece of spittle. It appears at the new (and ‘leading’) blog for centre-right Australians, called Menzies House. When they’re not live-blogging the Young Libs’ conference, or spruiking the virtues of free markets and virginity, some of them are attacking asylum seekers.

Patrick McGorry is a youth psychiatrist in Melbourne, who was named Australian of the Year for 2010. He made some criticisms, earlier in the years, of the Government’s policies regarding detention for asylum seekers, pointing out (not unreasonably) that they are likely to exacerbate mental illness.

Enter Menzies warrior James Darby.

Professor Patrick McGorry, newly appointed Australian Of The Year has said asylum seekers had experienced severe torture and trauma in their home countries and that people in detention needed to be processed quicker and while living in the community.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from here.

My view is that these kind and unrealistic views expressed by The Professor are extremely counter productive to the future well being of Australians.

We might well ask why.

The Professor could have served the interests of Australia better by naming the countries from whence these tortured and traumatised Asylum Seekers have come.
What are their occupations, their language and their religions?

Does a particular occupation or language shield one from post-traumatic stress?

How many of these invaders does the Professor expect Australia to release into the community?

Oh, I get it now. Did you see that? Those starving people from PNG or Sri Lanka are invaders, here to plunder your women and salt your earth. See their leaky invader boats, and tremble.

Can The Professor tell us how many would come to Australia if the solution for processing illegal refugees, Asylum Seekers, boat people, queue jumpers, is to “release them into the community for processing”?

The Professor is not a fortune-teller, James, any more than you are. We don’t have any evidence that delays in processing asylum seekers benefit anybody. None whatsoever.

Because the Professor wishes to be so generous at someone else’s expense it is surprising that he has not suggested that these people are flown into Australia as the boats that they intend to arrive on often sink.

Yes, it’s surprising that the Prof isn’t trying to get Rudd to charter Concordes for these Vikings. How droll, James. I bet those Young Liberal conferences are a hoot.

The Professor has not named the Countries from which these people come or the numbers of people who would come. You work it out. Indonesia hosts citizens of many Countries whose populations dream of escaping to Australia. Then you have virtually every Country from Viet Nam to Turkey. Then just about every African Country. There are about 15 million Philippinos who will come to Australia tomorrow.  Let’s not start on the Red Chinese.  The poverty, the religious fanaticism, the torture and the trauma created by the various forms of socialist Governments is not the responsibility of Australia.

You read the above correctly. According to James, every one of those miserable blighters from Asia (‘Red’ China), to Russia, the Central Asian states and the Caucasus, not to mention those uniform and homogeneous folk in Africa are all sitting back, refreshing their web browser, looking for news that Australia will process asylum applications more quickly. Should we have a humane, or even half-way efficient process, and lo, those victims of ‘socialist governments’ (in Sri Lanka, PNG, Iraq, Afghanistan) will come here, maybe even in the eleventy billions! Naturally, it can be assumed that those filthy Moroccans and Malaysians despise their own ‘socialist’ homelands so much that they’d universally jump at any opportunity to enter Australia.

I do agree with the Professor that detainees should not be ‘kept’ on Christmas Island. They should be returned to the last port of departure and their boats seized and scrapped.

So, on the global problem of refugees, one of the wealthiest countries on earth (i.e. Australia) should do nothing, and let a developing nation (like Indonesia) pick up the slack. How noble.

Accepting that Australia has entered into international obligations to accept refugees, let us allocate all those places to Christians who are suffering persecution.

This is James’ bizarre conclusion. We apparently can’t afford to encourage refugees to our shores, but maybe we can afford them, if said refugees are Christian. After all, what else are international obligations for?

People such as James are the ‘leading’ lights of the intellectual right. How embarrassing for you, centre-rightists.